Up From Kmart

The naming of a literary movement often coincides with its demise. At least that was the case with minimalism, the blanket term for a style of short fiction popular in the late 70's and early 80's and associated with struggling working-class characters, charmless rural and suburban settings and a certain terseness of expression. Also known as ''Kmart realism'' and applied to writers like Raymond Carver, Ann Beattie, Tobias Wolff and Bobbie Ann Mason, the label was part description, part dismissal. The idea was first to lump, and then lampoon. In ''Less Is Less,'' a 1986 essay in Harper's Magazine by the novelist Madison Smartt Bell, such writing was derided for its alleged ''obsessive concern for surface detail, a tendency to ignore or eliminate distinctions among the people it renders, and a studiedly deterministic, at times nihilistic, vision of the world.'' Just three years later, again in Harper's, Tom Wolfe accused such writers of a preference for ''real situations, but very tiny ones'' and ''disingenuously short, simple sentences -- with the emotions anesthetized, given a shot of Novocain.'' Wolf even implied that the style was un-American; it discounted the nation's glorious affluence, its spectacular richness, diversity and drive.

Accurate or not, the charges stuck. Only Carver, the movement's genius-by-acclamation, managed to hold onto his prestige completely, while the minimalist short story, as a form, soon joined the confessional poem and the Beat novel on the culture's basement discount rack. In what some would interpret as a sign of the Kmarters' sweeping loss of status, Mason -- once considered nearly Carver's peer on the basis of her debut collection, ''Shiloh and Other Stories'' -- moved on to writing novels and a memoir.

But now she's back with another book of stories, reclaiming a stage so conspicuously empty that it's hard to assess her new work in isolation. Does minimalism deserve a second act? Did its first act end too abruptly, with too much jeering? Or was the label really just a straw man stitched together by literary competitors who needed something to beat the stuffing out of so as to draw attention to their own styles? Were Mason and others set aflame, perhaps, to fuel the bonfire of Wolfe's vanity?

''I never paid much attention to current events, all the trouble in the world you hear about.'' The opening line of the book's first story, ''With Jazz,'' reads like a coded rejoinder to Mason's critics, whose fundamental charge against her tales (and their narrators, too) was detachment and simplemindedness. The speaker here, Chrissy, is vintage Mason: a twice-divorced resident of the sprawling mid-South, where country meets city in a ragged borderland of tract houses and chain stores. Chrissy blames the hassles of housekeeping and child rearing for her failure to stay abreast with the day's big issues. Lately, though, she's been trying to improve herself by meeting with a group of other women to ''talk about life, in a sort of talk-show format.'' The urge toward self-betterment, toward a higher consciousness, is a constant in the new stories. Mason's people may still watch too much TV, drink too much beer and love too indiscriminately, but their limitations pain them -- they're hardly anesthetized. More keenly, perhaps, than in the earlier book, they feel the pressures of the wider world and sense both its opportunities and perils. Some are even well traveled, though their journeys can leave them feeling more mystified than broadened.

Like a fictional time capsule, ''With Jazz'' reminds one both of what minimalism did well and what, looking back, it might have done better. First, a virtue. ''I found the kitchen light, just a bulb and string. The cord was new. It still had that starched feel, and the little metal bell on the end knot was shiny and sharp.'' There's no improving on this snapshot, be it tiny or not; for its size, it's framed just right. Even the movement's detractors, including Wolfe, praised its painstaking fast-shutter work. But Mason is more than just proficient here; her lightbulb cord, and a hundred other images dotted about the book, are edged in a thin black line of perfect solitude suggestive of a philosophical mood. Superficiality and depth aren't the relevant categories here; try togetherness and separateness. Objects stand on their own in Mason's stories, and so do people. To touch is not to merge. Between any two atoms -- or two lovers -- there's always a crack, and through the crack, a breeze.

Sometimes Mason's understated precision is asked to bear more weight than it can handle, though. To preserve the illusion of moment-to-moment realism, the stories' profundities must always seem offhand, their telling thematic statements accidental. Glancing up at a TV set in a bar, the moody Chrissy, who is about to become a grandmother, remarks to Jazz, her even-tempered almost-boyfriend: ''All the mussels in the lake are dying. It's all those pesticides.'' Jazz responds: ''World's always had trouble. No baby ever set foot in the Garden of Eden.'' As wayward bar talk, this isn't quite convincing; it speaks too directly to the story's big point about the serene acceptance of imperfection. Determined to send her big messages by stealth, Mason sometimes resorts to double meanings that are a bit too clever, even cute. Chrissy and Jazz first met in traffic court because ''we'd both failed to yield.'' At the end of this story about making peace with a baffling universe, the lovers lie in bed listening to the stereo. ''The music was still playing,'' Chrissy observes, ''on infinite repeat.''

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The mood here is closer to fatalism than nihilism, and a rather soothing fatalism at that. The mood returns in ''Night Flight,'' another story featuring a woman roughed up by life and hoping to start fresh while there's still time. Thinking she's safe back home in old Kentucky after a miserable stint in Florida working in a sterile corporate office and dating an unbalanced man, Wendy hooks up with Bob, a regular guy who loves to fish and is training for a pilot's license.

Not much happens, but what little does is squeezed for every last drop of metaphor. Like a lot of Mason's new heroines, Wendy has tasted excitement and spit it out -- she'd rather drink the tap water of normalcy -- but when what she thinks is a drug smuggling plane flies over her town, she understands that refuge is impossible. Later, during a barbecue with friends, Wendy and Bob are called out into the night to search for a lost child. While they hunt, and as bats flit out about in the dark sky, Bob reveals that he too has lost a child -- to a bitter ex-wife who won't grant him visitation rights. Things conclude with everyone dancing on the porch. ''Now they were all jitterbugging like bats across the moon, as if that was all anybody could do under the circumstances.''

Such a story is hardly casual or slight; if anything, it's too finished, too definitive. Like a fanatical builder of ships in bottles, Mason works with a fixed set of materials and pours her ambition into feats of craftsmanship. She's fierce about closure, often to a fault. In ''Tunica,'' Liz is the woman at loose ends and Peyton, a drug dealer, is the nasty ex-husband. Liz tries to escape life's ''dull predictability,'' and Peyton too, by visiting casinos, but eventually the old demons creep up on her. There are lovely grace notes along the way -- a fanfare of coins'' from a lucky slot machine; the silhouetted gambling halls that resemble ''a Confederate armada'' -- but the ending is another downbeat zinger that probably should have been left between the lines instead of extracted and set on top of them. ''For the time being, she was waiting for the spinning images of her life to line up in a perfect row.'' Perhaps Mason fears that her exquisite miniatures -- having so recently suffered such lofty contempt -- won't be properly appreciated unless their subtleties are clearly labeled.

The danger of such a manner isn't narrowness or lack of ambition or kneejerk pessimism. It's perfectionism. To show the world in a single grain of sand -- not just once, but repeatedly -- is an exacting, intimidating task. Mason's best stories come when she forgets about it, relaxes her focus and relies on instinct. In ''Charger,'' a rambunctious 19-year-old, anxious about achieving instant maturity, hits up his girlfriend's aunt for some Prozac. The kid wants it all -- adventure, money, love -- and longs for a pill to help him simmer down so he can hit the road and take his shot. What's so funny and sad is just how wrong he is; no one needs an antidepressant less than this prankish, hyperactive charmer. Of course there's a chance he'll come limping home someday, like most of Mason's chastened adventurers, but his future is still wide open, still unwritten, and his spirit is bigger than he knows.

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A version of this review appears in print on August 19, 2001, on Page 7007009 of the National edition with the headline: Up From Kmart. Today's Paper|Subscribe